Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday August 28, 2010 @08:37AM
from the oopsie-daisy dept.

alphadogg writes with this excerpt from Network World about an experiment gone wrong which affected a big chunk of internet traffic yesterday morning: "It was kicked off when RIPE NCC (Reseaux IP Europeens Network Coordination Centre) and Duke ran an experiment that involved the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) — used by routers to know where to send their traffic on the Internet. RIPE started announcing BGP routes that were configured a little differently from normal because they used an experimental data format. RIPE's data was soon passed from router to router on the Internet, and within minutes it became clear that this was causing problems. ... [f]or a brief period Friday morning, about 1 percent of all the Internet's traffic was affected by the snafu, as routers could not properly process the BGP routes they were being sent."

1% can be either large or small depending on what is being measured. For example, a Pointy Haired Boss may think the following:

* 1% of your web site user base using a different web browser is insignificant and can easily be ignored.* 1% of your annual profits is HUGE and losing or failing to obtain those means heads must roll.

(of course, a true PHB will never see any potential relationship between the two)

That's kind of the point isn't it? 1% isn't; a few hundred million is. That's the risk of using percentages: they tend to minimize the significance of the real numbers -- or alternatively, overstate their significance.

the trusting nature of BGP? if you inject bad advertisement for too long, you'll get marked as damaged, and the BGP AS will begin converging around you. (cutting off any private subscribers you maintain as they no longer have valid routes back to them from the internet.)

in current BGP, you don't GET trusted, you BUILD trust. you're established a very high metric (or weight) for distance routing initially, and as you carry traffic, (or as more and more traffic originates from your network from your subscribers) your metric will be lowered overtime, moving greater and greater volumes of traffic over your infrastructure.